Hayk Harutyunyan works in a world where nothing behaves the way it does in everyday life.
It’s called nanophotonics, where light interacts with matter on an almost unimaginably tiny scale. “The most important thing about light is that it’s a wave,” says Harutyunyan, a professor in Emory’s Department of Physics. “And if you try to focus a wave into a small volume, that volume cannot be smaller than the wavelength of the light. So that limits the things we can do with light.”
An example would be a conventional light microscope, which cannot resolve details smaller than the wavelength of the light itself. “Nanophotonics is the science of trying to break this barrier,” says Harutyunyan. “It’s trying to squeeze light, or any electromagnetic energy, into much smaller volumes, so you can look at things like proteins or DNA.”
Nanophotonics researchers work toward understanding what happens to light at such a small scale. How does it interact with matter? How can the interactions be controlled, and what can you do with them?
Among other things, nanophotonics opens up the possibility of higher-speed data communication, quantum computing at far higher speeds than contemporary computers and even targeted medical treatments.
Harutyunyan’s own research centers on a subfield called nonlinear optics, where extremely intense laser light aimed at precisely fabricated materials causes those materials to produce new colors that weren’t there before.
A seed grant from Emory’s University Research Committee (URC) allowed him to research new light sources and explore ways to make interactions with materials produce more powerful outputs.
“These types of interactions are very weak,” he says. “Typically, you don’t get a lot of light out. We found a way to make the efficiency higher.”
The process works by making electrons jump across tiny pieces of metal separated by an even smaller, nanoscale gap. Concentrated energy at that scale can become light or be used to control electronic signals.
Building upon their URC-funded study, Harutyunyan’s lab later explored ways to switch this nanoscale light on and off — an ability that could make it possible to control light flows as precisely as the computer chips in phones control the flow of electrons. It’s a technology that has the potential to be the successor to the silicon revolution in electronics.
“Everything we do now is pretty much based on the electronic system,” Harutyunyan says. “If you want to transition to optical devices, which are faster and consume less energy, you need to control light in the same way. We are basically creating something like an optical transistor.”
None of this subsequent, externally funded research would have been possible without the URC-funded project.
“It’s difficult to find federal funding for completely new areas when you don’t already have that expertise,” Harutyunyan says. “To an outsider, it looked like these guys were working with nonlinear optics. They may know how to operate lasers, but they don’t understand applied voltages. It looked like a very risky investment.
“Fortunately, URC could afford not to be that bureaucratic,” he says. “There were no requirements to prove that this is actually feasible first. The URC was more comfortable taking risks, encouraging us to use this as a stepping stone. That paid off.”